I am a consultant and the author of 24 books on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the semantic web. My favorite languages are Java, Haskell, Python, Common Lisp, and Ruby.

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Saturday, March 18, 2006

Blue Ray and HD-DVD; Amazon S3 storage

Good news, I guess that consumer devices are finally coming out. Still, I am a skeptic - I am thinking about and drawing analogies to LaserDisks and BetaMax. In bulk, I pay about 10 cents for CDRs and about 75 cents for DVD-Rs - $25 for a writable Blue Ray disk or half that (?) for a writable HD-DVD seems expensive. The convenience of higher capacity, for me, is cancelled out by the desire for redundancy: would I back up as often on such expensive media?

I am more excited by Amazon's S3 storage system because it fills a real need that I have for secondary (backup) persistence for web applications. I like to develop close to "no maintenance" web applications. Part of the solution is to use managed hosting (I favor Xen based virtual servers for low cost and good performance) so your web application can be swapped to another server (along with your complete virtual OS environment) when hardware fails. Amazon's S3 service fills the need for incrementally backing up user data "off site", and the price is low assuming you do not need too much storage or bandwidth.